Inktober 52 - 2021 30

Fanart time! Honestly though, setting Ink as the prompt is very meta, to the point where I wondered whether I should think about it longer, but considering I've been drawing a lot animals lately, I might as well get back to humans, full humans at that, since I've been cropping out most of them recently. There's a good number of characters with inky aesthetics to pick from, but the one that's been relevant to me most recently is probably the Azure Empyrea from Honkai Impact, which I guess is a bit older technically, but it's got the most literal interpretation of the ink theme as a bonus.

This is usually how far I'd get with pencils alone. The next step would be erasing and retracing my steps, but I'm just too lazy to do that most of the time, so I'm prone to leaving it as is. Since I'm inking now though, I'll have to clean it up anyway. The trouble is, that I've not yet penciled in all the details, and if I were to try and do that now, it would end up even more chaotic than it already is. The torso-area especially is kinda messy, and the details of fingers would exacerbate the problem. This means that I have to ink the parts that are in the foreground and that I'm sure won't change anymore.

I'm not too sure about the hair yet, so I started with the shoulder and collar area. I figured I could work my way downward, until fabric starts getting involved, at which point I'll need to get creative.

As terrible as the mess was around the torso, I think erasing it really helped. I did stick to penciling in fabric as it becomes relevant - or visible to my eye. As it gets cleaner, I can better convince myself to take the fine-liner to other parts of the piece. I'm kinda questioning my composition now though, mainly since the posture seems a little odd.

Meh, I thought I'd leave the hair ornaments originally, but it does seem right adding them in, since it's starting to look like I'm going to put some time into the rest of the outfit.

At this point I'm really having to think about the posture. I think as is, the back doesn't look like it should be attached to a sitting person. It looks very noticably straight, I think, and the rest of the posture isn't as tense, so I might have to pivot at this point.

Okay, so I pivoted a little hard. The posture ended up a little flat, but it's definitely an improvement on the strained sitting position I had earlier. I'm sure if I add some stuff to the background I can balance the picture a little bit, and then she'll look a little less like she's floating in a void.

Yeah, the flatness is a bit less noticable now, that she's interacting with stuff now. I'm also pretty happy with the umbrella in the background, seeing as I usually struggle with those sorts of constructions. Paying extra attention to the fabric is honestly the only way I could've done this in the first place, but maybe in a more structured process I'll manage it better.

Deepest colours stain the white

fabric held against the light

illuminating intricate

patterns, small and delicate,

draped over a tiny height

left there, drying over night.